


The Cause

by Amber_and_Ash



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 20:33:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13725453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amber_and_Ash/pseuds/Amber_and_Ash
Summary: Wanda also thinks her backstory was badly written. Random elements taken from multiple Marvel sources, put in a pot and stirred.





	The Cause

**Author's Note:**

> Life happened, and is continuing to happen, but have a short peace offering.

 

Wanda appreciated the fact that this was good for The Cause. She did. And she wasn’t going to turn up her nose at being alive and free. She wanted to be alive and free and in a position to continue the good work. She just hated when stupid people were right, and the stupidest people wrote HYDRA’s back stories.

She didn’t care that they kept pretending she and her work partner were twins. She thought it was a lazy way to halve the number of backstories they had to create, but it was at least not idiotic. She supposed it made sense to make them the adopted children of holocaust survivors that time they’d been sent in undercover to that mutant group. People took longer to start wondering if she was a secret HYDRA agent when the question would seem simultaneously absurd and insensitive. But the ‘Stark missile fell on my house’ backstory her and Pietro were told to play up for the cameras over the sceptre reached epic level of stupidity.

“Carefully targeted to the psychology of Captain America and Iron Man?” Bullshit. They’d scribbled down the first thing that came to mind on the back of an envelope when they realised they’d missed their deadline. The whole thing was a mess that didn’t even withstand half a second of questioning.

Who had been doing the firing? Who had they been firing _at_ to end up hitting a suburban apartment block? Why had been willing to spend top dollar on Stark missiles rather than the many cheaper alternatives? If the previous missile – of three! – had killed her parents, why hadn’t one of the previous explosions already killed her, her brother, and most of the block? Stark did sell (well, had sold) precision weapons, but were fuck-off big missiles really part of that line? If the ‘dud’ missile (and did Stark missiles even ever have duds?) had been fired, or even just dropped from any height, surely it would have been much too damaged for her to have read the logo? Was the story supposed to be that it had been gently nudged out of a low flying helicopter or something? And it bore repeating, why did she care so little at whoever had made her parents collateral damage that she didn’t even appear to know who they were?

Moving on to the aftermath, how had the twins been both uninjured _and_ trapped in that room for days? Did fire-escapes and windows not exist in this reality? Did all the army, emergency services, neighbours, family, family friends, teachers, and anyone who could conceivably have worried about them _all_ simultaneously decide to take a few days’ vacation? And then who had taken them in afterwards who was willing to keep them in clothes and food but not notice when they wandered off to join a terrorist organisation? (And was she really supposed to pull off being a teenager? She hadn’t had her ID checked at bars for almost a decade!)

Even if you allowed for some child-hood misremembering and some one-in-a-lifetime co-incidences, the biggest, stupidest question could not be reasoned away. Why on earth would she have blamed Tony Stark personally? (Was she supposed to have a secondary target of William Boeing Jr because whoever-it-was had probably been flying a plane?)

Pietro talked her out of objecting. It was a throwaway, and didn’t have to be anything more than superficially convincing. As long as any subsequent investigation didn’t realise they’d deliberately exposed the AI to Stark’s mind for The Cause, it didn’t really matter how unconvincing the motivation was. Pietro promised to do the hard work of selling it himself, and he was good at things like that. It was short term.

It was short term while they positioned Stark to come into contact with Ultron. It was short term when they sounded out Ultron to see whether he would support The Cause. It was short term when that went wrong and they had to throw in with the Avengers, despite the inevitable eventual need to suicide to avoid interrogation. It was short term.

But then Pietro kicked off the suicide plan a little early and none of the ‘good guys’ seemed to notice it had been an entirely pointless sacrifice. But then they took her change of heart as gospel and didn’t ask her any questions. But then they made her an Avenger. So she was stuck with the world’s stupidest backstory, no way to contact her handlers, and no idea what to do. So she lived day to day, obeying Steve’s orders, waiting for the other shoe to drop, pretending to be the person they imagined her to be. So she stood there, on that isolated balcony, trying to comfort Steve after his best friend had gone back under ice.

“At least no-one can hurt him or exploit him now?” she asked, more than said.

Captain America looked back at her, the fixed expression on his perfect face highlighting just how inhumane he really was.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It's a pity, but the Winter Soldier had become a liability to The Cause.”


End file.
